Kevin Phillips, former Republican
strategist and bestselling author of American Dynasty
and Wealth and Democracy, provides a critical
and extensively researched analysis of the current political
condition as shaped by the “Republican Majority” and the
alarming future it poses in his latest book, American
Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil,
and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century. This book will
be published on March 21, 2006.

Phillips identifies the
role of oil in American foreign policy, the intrusion of
radical Christianity into politics, and the explosion of
debt, and links them in a frightening vision of the future
of America and the world.

The New York Times
writes:

“What makes this book powerful in spite of the
familiarity of many of its arguments is (Phillips’) rare
gift for looking broadly and structurally at social and
political change ... Phillips has created a harrowing
picture of national danger that no American reader will
welcome, but that none should ignore.”

*****************

Praise
For American Dynasty:

"Devastating . . . an
important, troubling book that should be read everywhere
with care, nowhere more so than in this city."—Jonathan
Yardley, The Washington Post Book
World

"(Phillips) is a deep thinker extraordinaire,
who does a masterful job of connecting the
military-industrial dots. . . . A searing indictment of the
Bush Dynasty."—Douglas Brinkley, Mother
Jones

*****************

Description:From America’s premier political analyst, an
explosive examination of the axis of religion, politics, and
borrowed money that threatens to destroy the nation

In
his two most recent New York Times bestselling books,
American Dynasty and Wealth and Democracy, Kevin Phillips
established himself as a powerful critic of the political
and economic forces that rule—and imperil—the United States,
tracing the ever more alarming path of the emerging
Republican majority’s rise to power. Now, Phillips takes an
uncompromising view of the newest stage of the GOP majority:
an inept and weakly led coalition, dominated by religious
zealotry, that is losing America the world’s respect—and
endangering her future.

From Ancient Rome to the British
Empire, Phillips demonstrates that every world-dominating
power has been brought down by an overlapping set of
problems: a foolish combination of global overreach,
militant religion, diminishing resources, and ballooning
debt. It is exactly this nexus of ills that has come to
define American’s political and economic identity at the
start of this century. Matching his command of history with
a penetrating analysis of contemporary politics, Phillips
surveys a century of foreign policy and wars in the Middle
East, showing how all, to one degree or another, reflected
our ever-growing preoccupation with oil. Today, that
dangerous inheritance includes clumsy military
miscalculations, the ruinous occupation of Iraq, and
sky-high oil prices.

He then turns to the surge of
fundamentalist and evangelical religion in the United
States, outlining the way a long tradition of radical and
sectarian religion has taken an unprecedented political role
under George W. Bush, as more and more Republicans think in
apocalyptic terms and seek to shape domestic and foreign
policy around religion. Finally, he documents how Wall
Street and the business interests so closely allied with
Washington have discarded the principles of sound finance
that once characterized Republican fiscal policy and have
literally mortgaged the country’s economic health to
financial speculation, accompanied by an unprecedented level
of public and private debt.

Oil, religion, and finance are
not new elements in U.S. politics, but as Phillips makes
clear with his formidable command of fact, figure, and
history, and his long experience as a political strategist
and observer, we are now in new and dangerous territory. The
Bush coalition has resulted in a dearth of candor and
serious strategy—a paralysis of policy and a government
unable to govern. If left unchecked—the same forces will
bring a preacher-ridden, debt-bloated, energy-crippled
America to its knees. With an eye on the past and a searing
vision of the future, Phillips confirms what too many
Americans are still unwilling to admit about the depth of
our misgovernment.

Kevin Phillips is a former
Republican strategist, has been a political and economic
commentator for more than three decades. He writes for the
Los Angeles Times as well as Harper’s Magazine and Time. His
thirteen books include the New York Times bestsellers
American Dynasty, The Politics of Rich and Poor and Wealth
and Democracy.

*****************

American
Theocracy

CONTENTS

Preface vii

PART I: OIL AND
AMERICAN SUPREMACY

1 Fuel and National Power 32 The
Politics of American Oil Dependence 313 Trumpets of
Democracy, Drums of Gasoline 68

PART II: TOO MANY
PREACHERS

4 Radicalized Religion: As American As Apple Pie
995 Defeat and Resurrection: The Southernization of
America 1326 The United States in a Dixie Cup: The New
Religious and Political Battlegrounds 1717 Church,
State, and National Decline 218

The
American people are not fools. That is why pollsters,
inquiring during the last forty years whether the United
States was on the right track or the wrong one, have so
often gotten the second answer: wrong track. That was
certainly the case again as the year 2005 closed
out.

Because survey takers do not always pursue
explanations, this book will venture some. Reckless
dependency on shrinking oil supplies, a milieu of
radicalized (and much too influential) religion, and a
reliance on borrowed money—debt, in its ballooning size and
multiple domestic and international deficits—now constitute
the three major perils to the United States of the
twenty-first century.

Shouldn’t war and terror be on the
list? Yes—and they are, one step removed. Both derive much
of their current impetus from the incendiary backdrop of oil
politics and religious fundamentalism, in Islam as well as
the West. Despite pretensions to motivations such as liberty
and freedom, petroleum and its geopolitics have dominated
Anglo-American activity in the Middle East for a full
century. On this, history could not be more clear.

The
excesses of fundamentalism, in turn, are American and
Israeli, as well as the all-too-obvious depredations of
radical Islam. The rapture, end-times, and Armageddon
hucksters in the United States rank with any Shiite
ayatollahs, and the last two presidential elections mark the
transformation of the GOP into the first religious party in
U.S. history.

The financialization of the United States
economy over the last three decades—in the 1990s the
finance, real-estate, and insurance sector overtook and then
strongly passed manufacturing as a share of the U.S. gross
domestic product—is an ill omen in its own right. However,
its rise has been closely tied to record levels of debt and
to the powerful emergence of a debt-and-credit industrial
complex. Excessive debt in the twenty-first-century United
States is on its way to becoming the global Fifth Horseman,
riding close behind war, pestilence, famine, and
fire.

This book’s title, American Theocracy, sums up a
potent change in this country’s domestic and foreign policy
making—religion’s new political prowess and its role in the
projection of military power in the Middle Eastern Bible
lands—that most people are just beginning to understand. We
have had theocracies in North America before—in Puritan New
England and later in Mormon Utah—but except in their
earliest beginnings, they lacked the intensity of those in
Europe, such as John Calvin’s Geneva or the Catholic Spain
of the Inquisition.

Indeed, most of the Christian
theocracies touched on by historians shared two unusual and
virtually defining characteristics. First, they were very
small in geographic terms. Second, and more important, they
were the demographic results of migrations by true
believers. The population of John Calvin’s sixteenth-century
Geneva was swollen by French Protestant refugees, and the
Dutch Reformed Calvinists of the Netherlands got a kindred
infusion from Flemish refugees fleeing Spanish-controlled
Antwerp. The Massachusetts Bay Colony, in turn, was built by
English Puritan emigrants, and the nineteenth-century
Mormons in Utah represented still another Zion-bound
migration. As for Spain, despite militant Catholicism and
the infamous Inquisition, it was too large and varied a
nation to fit the small-scale theocratic pattern.
Seventeenth-century attempts to shut down Spanish theaters,
gambling houses, and brothels failed, and the golden age of
Spanish literature and art—from Cervantes to El
Greco—flourished in Toledo and Madrid under court, church,
and noble patronage despite periodic homosexual reports and
scandals that the Inquisition did not greatly
pursue.1

Theocracy in America is of this lesser breed. The
United States is too big and too diverse to resemble the
Massachusetts Bay Colony of John Winthrop or
sixteenth-century Geneva or even nineteenth-century Utah. A
leading world power such as the United States, with almost
three hundred million people and huge international
responsibilities, goes about as far in a theocratic
direction as it can when it satisfies the unfortunate
criteria on display in Washington circa 2005: an elected
leader who believes himself in some way to speak for God, a
ruling political party that represents religious true
believers and seeks to mobilize the churches, the conviction
of many voters in that Republican party that government
should be guided by religion, and on top of it all, White
House implementation of domestic and international political
agendas that seem to be driven by religious motivations and
biblical worldviews. All of these factors and many more are
discussed at length in part 2 of this book.

The three
threats emphasized in these pages could stand on their own
as menaces to the Republic. History, however, provides a
further level of confirmation. Natural resources, religious
excess, wars, and burgeoning debt levels have been prominent
causes of the downfall of the previous leading world
economic powers. The United States is hardly the first, and
we can profit from the examples of what went wrong
before.

Oil, as everyone knows, became the all-important
fuel of American global ascendancy in the twentieth century.
But before that, nineteenth-century Britain was the coal
hegemon and seventeenth-century Dutch fortune harnessed the
winds and the waters. Neither nation could maintain its
global economic leadership when the world moved toward a new
energy regime. Today’s United States, despite denials, has
obviously organized much of its overseas military posture
around petroleum, protecting oil fields, pipelines, and sea
lanes.

But U.S. preoccupation with the Middle East has two
dimensions. In addition to its concerns with oil and
terrorism, the White House is courting end-times theologians
and electorates for whom the holy lands are already a
battleground of Christian destiny. Both pursuits, oil and
biblical expectations, require a dissimulation in Washington
that undercuts the U.S. tradition of commitment to the role
of an informed electorate.

The political
corollary—fascinating but appalling—is the recent
transformation of the Republican presidential coalition.
Since the elections of 2000 and especially of 2004, three
pillars have become increasingly central: (1) the
oil–national security complex, with its pervasive interests;
(2) the religious right, with its doctrinal imperatives and
massive electorate; and (3) the debt-dealing financial
sector, which extends far beyond the old symbolism of Wall
Street. In December 2004 The New York Times took up the term
“borrower-industrial complex” to identify one profitable
engine of exploding consumer debt.

That name does not
quite work, but we can hardly use a term like the
credit-card/mortgage/auto-loan/corporate-debt/federal-borrowing
industrial complex. This is a problem still searching for
its Election Day Halloween mask. In any event, the rapid
ballooning of government, corporate, financial, and personal
debt over the last four decades goes a long way to explain
why the finance sector, debt’s toll collector, has swollen
to outweigh the manufacture of real goods. We are in the
midst of one of America’s most perverse
transformations.

George W. Bush has promoted these
alignments, interest groups, and their underpinning values.
His family, over multiple generations, has been tied to a
politics that conjoined finance, national security, and oil.
In recent decades, operating from the federal executive
branch, the Bushes have added close ties to evangelical and
fundamentalist power brokers of many persuasions. These
origins, biases, and practices were detailed in my last
book, American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the
Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush (2004). The present
volume, therefore, revisits mostly the family’s influence in
helping these trends and guiding these
constituencies.

Over three decades of Bush presidencies,
vice presidencies, and CIA directorships, the Republican
party has slowly become the vehicle of all three interests—a
fusion of petroleum-defined national security; a crusading,
simplistic Christianity; and a reckless credit-feeding
financial complex. The three are increasingly allied in
commitment to Republican politics, if not in full agreement
with one another. On the most important front, I am
beginning to think that the southern-dominated, biblically
driven Washington GOP represents a rogue coalition, like the
southern, proslavery politics that controlled Washington
until Lincoln’s election in 1860.

But the national
Democrats have their own complicity. Their lack of
understanding and moxie has contributed to the mutation of
the GOP. Without that weak and muddled opposition, both
before and after September 11, the Republican transformation
would have been impolitic and perhaps impossible.

Clearly
the pitfalls of petro-politics, radical religion, and debt
finance have to be addressed in their own right. However, I
have a personal concern over what has become of the
Republican coalition. Forty years ago, I began a book,
finished in 1967 and taken to the 1968 Republican
presidential campaign, for which I became the chief
political and voting-patterns analyst. Published in 1969,
while I was still in the fledgling Nixon administration, The
Emerging Republican Majority became highly controversial.
Newsweek identified it as “The political bible of the Nixon
Era.”

In that book I coined the term “Sun Belt” to
describe the oil, military, aerospace, and retirement
country that stretched from Florida to California, but
debate concentrated on the argument—since fulfilled and then
some—that the South was on its way into the national
Republican party. Four decades later, this framework has
produced the triple mutation that this book will
discuss.

Some of that evolution was always implicit. If
any region of the United States had the potential to produce
a high-powered, crusading fundamentalism, it was Dixie. If
any new alignment had the potential to nurture a fusion of
oil interests and the military-industrial complex, it was
the Sun Belt that helped to draw them into commercial and
political proximity and collaboration. Wall Street, of
course, has long been part of the GOP coalition. On the
other hand, members of the Downtown Association and the
Links Club were never enthusiastic about “Joe Sixpack” and
middle America, to say nothing of preachers such as Oral
Roberts or the Tupelo, Mississippi, Assemblies of God. The
new cohabitation is an unnatural one.

Little was said
about oil in The Emerging Republican Majority, partly
because I knew I would be in the government when the book
appeared. Still, oilmen liked its political thesis, and I
fleshed out an analysis still relevant today—that the
nation’s oil, coal, and natural-gas sections, despite their
intramural differences, would be regional mainstays of the
new “heartland”-centered GOP national coalition. Hitherto,
these interests had been divided by the political
Mason-Dixon Line. That division would and did end.

While
studying economic geography and history in Britain some
years earlier, I had been intrigued by the Eurasian
“heartland” theory of Sir Halford Mackinder, a prominent
early-twentieth-century geographer. Control of the
heartland, Mackinder argued, would determine control of the
world. In North America, I thought the coming together of a
heartland—across fading Civil War lines—would determine
control of Washington.

Wordsmith William Safire, in his
The New Language of Politics entry on the heartland, cited
Mackinder. He then noted that “political analyst Kevin
Phillips applied the old geopolitical word to U.S. politics
in his 1969 book The Emerging Republican Majority:
‘Twenty-one of the twenty-five Heartland states supported
Richard Nixon in 1968. . . . Over the remainder of the
century, the Heartland should dominate American politics in
tandem with suburbia, the South and Sun Belt–swayed
California.’”2

This was the prelude to today’s “red
states.” Mackinder’s worldview has its own second wind
because his Eurasian cockpit has reemerged as the pivot of
the international struggle for oil. In a similar context,
the American heartland, from Wyoming, Colorado, and New
Mexico to Ohio and the Appalachian coal states, has become
(along with the rest of the onetime Confederacy) the seat of
a fossil-fuels political alliance—an electoral hydrocarbon
coalition. It cherishes SUVs and easy carbon dioxide
emissions policy, and applauds preemptive U.S. air strikes
on uncooperative, terrorist-coddling Persian Gulf countries
fortuitously blessed with huge reserves of oil.

Because
the United States is beginning to run out of its own oil
sources, a military solution to an energy crisis is hardly
lunacy. Neither Caesar nor Napoléon would have flinched, and
the temptation, at least, is understandable. What Caesar and
Napoléon did not face, but less able American presidents do,
is that bungled overseas military embroilment, unfortunate
in its own right, could also boomerang economically. The
United States, some $4 trillion in hock internationally, has
become the world’s leading debtor, increasingly nagged by
worry that some nations will sell dollars in their reserves
and switch their holdings to rival currencies. Washington
prints bonds and dollar-green IOUs, which European and Asian
bankers accumulate until for some reason they lose patience.
This is the debt Achilles’ heel, which stands alongside the
oil Achilles’ heel.

Unfortunately, as much or more
dynamite hides in the responsiveness of the new GOP
coalition to Christian evangelicals, fundamentalists, and
Pentecostals, who muster some 40 percent of the party
electorate. Many, many millions believe that the Armageddon
described in the Bible is coming soon. Chaos in the
explosive Middle East, far from being a threat, actually
heralds the awaited second coming of Jesus Christ. Oil-price
spikes, murderous hurricanes, deadly tsunamis, and melting
polar ice caps lend further credence.

The potential
interaction between the end-times electorate, inept pursuit
of Persian Gulf oil, Washington’s multiple deceptions, and
the credit and financial crisis that could follow a
substantial liquidation by foreign holders of U.S. bonds is
the stuff of nightmares. To watch U.S. voting patterns
enable such policies—the GOP coalition is unlikely to turn
back—is depressing to someone who spent many years
researching, watching, and cheering those grass
roots.

Four decades ago, although The Emerging Republican
Majority said little about southern fundamentalists and
evangelicals, the new GOP coalition seemed certain to enjoy
a major infusion of conservative northern Catholics and
southern Protestants. This troubled me not at all. During
the 1970s and part of the 1980s, I agreed with the
predominating Republican argument that “secular” liberals,
by badly misjudging the depth and importance of religion in
the United States, had given conservatives a powerful and
legitimate electoral opportunity.

Since then, my
appreciation of the intensity of religion in the United
States has deepened. Its huge carryover from the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries turns out to have seeded a similar
evangelical wave in the twentieth and early twenty-first
centuries. In 1998, after years of research, I published The
Cousins’ Wars, a lengthy study of the three great
English-speaking internal convulsions—the English Civil War
of the 1640s, the American Revolution, and the American War
Between the States. Amid each fratricide, religious
divisions figured so strongly in people’s choosing sides
that persisting threads became clear—pietists and puritans
versus high-church adherents, and a recurrent conviction by
militant evangelicals, from the 1640s to the 1860s,
culminating in the American Civil War, that theirs was the
cause of liberty and the Protestant Reformation. The overall
analysis and its documentation were taken seriously enough
that the book became a finalist for that year’s Pulitzer
Prize in history. Indeed, my wife and I were sufficiently
impressed by the historical roles of the scores of
eighteenth-century churches we visited—from the pastel
Caribbean stuccos of Anglican South Carolina to the stone
fortresses of Presbyterian Pennsylvania and the white
Congregational meetinghouses of New England—to think of
writing a book on them sometime (we still do).

Such was
religion’s enduring importance in the United States when it
was trod upon in the 1960s and thereafter by secular
advocates determined to push Christianity out of the public
square, a mistake that unleashed an evangelical,
fundamentalist, and Pentecostal counterreformation that in
some ways is still building. As part 2 will explore, strong
theocratic pressures are already visible in the Republican
national coalition and its leadership, while the substantial
portion of Christian America committed to theories of
Armageddon and the inerrancy of the Bible has already made
the GOP into America’s first religious party.

Its
religiosity reaches across the board—from domestic policy to
foreign affairs. Besides providing critical support for
invading Iraq, widely anathematized by preachers as a second
Babylon, the Republican coalition’s clash with science has
seeded half a dozen controversies. These include Bible-based
disbelief in Darwinian theories of evolution, dismissal of
global warming, disagreement with geological explanations of
fossil-fuel depletion, religious rejection of global
population planning, derogation of women’s rights,
opposition to stem-cell research, and so on. This suggests
that U.S. society and politics may again be heading for a
defining controversy such as the Scopes trial of 1925. That
embarrassment chastened fundamentalism for a generation, but
the outcome of the eventual twenty-first-century test is
hardly assured.

Book buyers will understand that in these
United States volumes able to sell two or three hundred
thousand hardcover copies are uncommon. Not rare, just
uncommon. Consider, then, the publishing success of
end-times preacher Tim LaHaye, earlier the politically
shrewd founder (in 1981) of the Washington-based Council for
National Policy. Beginning in 1994 LaHaye successfully
coauthored a series of books on the rapture, the
tribulation, and the road to Armageddon that has since sold
some sixty million copies in print, video, and cassette
forms. Evangelist Jerry Falwell hailed it as probably the
most influential religious publishing event since the
Bible.3 Several novels of the Left Behind series rose to
number one on the New York Times fiction bestseller list,
and the series as a whole almost certainly reached fifteen
to twenty million American voters. Political aides in the
Bush White House must have read several volumes, if only for
pointers on constituency sentiment.

In that respect, the
books were highly informative. LaHaye’s novels furnished
hints rarely discussed by serious publications as to why
George W. Bush’s 2002–2003 call for war in Iraq included
jeering at the United Nations, harped on the evil regime in
Baghdad, and pretended that democracy, not oil, was the
motive. LaHaye had authored essentially that plot almost a
decade earlier. His evil antichrist, who had a French
financial adviser and rose to power through the United
Nations, was headquartered in New Babylon, Iraq, not far
from the Baghdad of Bush’s arch-devil, Saddam Hussein. The
fictional Tribulation Force, which fought in God’s name,
represented goodness and had nothing to do with oil, which
was one of the antichrist’s evil chessboards.

Twenty years
ago, The New York Times would not have considered LaHaye for
the bestseller list, and my scenario of his writings
influencing the White House could only have been spoof. Not
so today. In a late-2004 speech, the retiring television
journalist Bill Moyers, himself an ordained Baptist
minister, broke with polite convention. He told an audience
at the Harvard medical school that “one of the biggest
changes in politics in my lifetime is that the delusional is
no longer marginal. It has come in from the fringe, to sit
in the seat of power in the Oval Office and in Congress. For
the first time in our history, ideology and theology hold a
monopoly of power in Washington.”4

I would put it somewhat
differently. These developments have warped the Republican
party and its electoral coalition, muted Democratic voices,
and become a gathering threat to America’s future. No
leading world power in modern memory has become a captive,
even a partial captive, of the sort of biblical
inerrancy—backwater, not mainstream—that dismisses modern
knowledge and science. The last parallel was in the early
seventeenth century, when the papacy, with the agreement of
inquisitional Spain, disciplined the astronomer Galileo for
saying that the sun, not the earth, was the center of our
solar system.

Conservative true believers will scoff: the
United States is sui generis, they say, a unique and chosen
nation. What did or did not happen to Rome, imperial Spain,
the Dutch Republic, and Britain is irrelevant. The catch
here, alas, is that these nations also thought they were
unique and that God was on their side. The revelation that
He was apparently not added a further debilitating note to
the later stages of each national decline. Perhaps the
warfare, earthquakes, plagues, and turmoil of the early
twenty-first century are unprecedented, but the religious
believers of yesteryear also saw millennial signs in flood,
plagues, famines, comets, and Mongol and Turkish
invasions.

Over the course of the last twenty-five years,
I have made frequent reference to these political, economic,
and historical (but not religious) precedents in several
books, most recently in Wealth and Democracy (2002). The
concentration of wealth that developed in the United States
in the long bull market of 1982–2000 was also a
characteristic of the zeniths of the previous leading world
economic powers as their elites pursued surfeit in
Mediterranean villas or in the country-house splendor of
Edwardian England.

This volume, to be sure, is mostly
about something other than wealth. Its concluding chapters
in part 3 concentrate on the perils of debt, albeit that is
also a financial excess. As we will see, wealth and debt
have often overextended together in the modern trajectories
of leading world economic powers. In a nation’s early years,
debt is a vital and creative collaborator in economic
expansion; in late stages, it becomes what Mr. Hyde was to
Dr. Jekyll: an increasingly dominant mood and facial
distortion. The United States of the early twenty-first
century is well into this debt-driven climactic, with some
critics arguing—all too plausibly—that an unsustainable
credit bubble has replaced the stock bubble that burst in
2000.

Unfortunately, as my subtitle argues, three of the
preeminent weaknesses displayed in these past declines have
been religious excess, an outdated or declining energy and
industrial base, and financialization and debt (from foreign
and military overstretch). The examples have been clear, and
they thread my analysis in this book. The extent to which
politics in the United States—and especially the governing
Republican coalition—deserves much of the blame for this
fatal convergence is not only the book’s subject matter but
its raison d’être.

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